Greetings, and welcome to the Saga Communications Fourth Quarter and Year-End Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode and we will – excuse me. And it is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Chris Forgy. The floor is yours.

Thank you, John. Good morning, and thank you to everyone who's taken time to join the Saga's Q4 and year end 2024 earnings call. We appreciate your continued interest, your questions, your suggestions and your support of Saga Communications, what we believe is the best media company on the planet. We have a lot to cover today, but first, I'd really like to thank those who have been so instrumental in the transformational change Saga has been going through and continues to go through over the past two years. Our corporate team, our Saga Board of Directors, our carefully chosen third-party partners, our shareholders, our leadership teams in each of Saga's 28 markets. Our Saga Media advisers are nearly 800 Saga employees all over the country who make this engine go and to our customers, those who trust us with their advertising dollars to bring about outcomes. After all, money does come from customers doesn't it? Transformational change is really not easy. We're in the midst of it. It takes time, resources, people, training, commitment and a very strong belief in what you're building will be successful. And we do, we chose this passive transformational change, both out of necessity and because we believe we have identified a local digital advertising market right for disruption. We determine these four things. Number one, there's a significant increase in advertising dollars. Businesses are pouring their money, more money into digital advertising each and every year. But the rapid growth of digital budgets has outpaced the ability of advertisers to use them effectively. Number two, there were frustrated buyers with unmet needs. Advertisers are just simply fed up with ineffective evergreen, set it and forget it campaigns and empty promises. They don't like what they're buying or who they're buying it from. These…

Thank you, Chris. This call will contain forward-looking statements about our future performance and results of operations that involve risks and uncertainties that are described in the Risk Factors section of our most recent Form 10-K. This call will also contain a discussion of certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation for all the non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure are attached in the selected financial data tables. For the quarter ended December 31, 2024, net revenue decreased 1.3% to $28.8 million compared to $29.1 million last year. Political impacted this year's performance. As for the quarter, we had $2.0 million in gross political revenue this year compared to $407,000 for the same period last year. Without political, our overall gross revenue for the quarter would have decreased approximately 6.5% from last year. Station operating expense increased 4.1% to $24.3 million for the three-month period. Operating income was $984,000 and station operating income, a non-GAAP measure, was $5.9 million for the quarter. Capital expenditures were $600,000 for the quarter compared to $1 million for the fourth quarter last year. Net income for the quarter was $1.3 million or $0.20 per fully diluted share. On a same-station basis for the quarter ended December 31, 2024, net revenue decreased 3.9% to $28 million, and station operating expense increased 0.7% to $23.5 million. Operating income decreased to $1 million. For the 12-month period ended December 31, 2024, net revenue decreased 2.2% to $110.3 million compared to $112.8 million last year. Political impact of this year's performance as for the year, we had $3.3 million in political -- gross political revenue this year compared to $944,000 for the same period last year. Without political, our overall gross revenue for the year would have decreased approximately 4.3% from last year. Station operating expense…

Thank you for that Sam. Allow me to share several data points from a five market snapshot inside Saga, which further illustrates how blended advertising has already impacted Saga's local, direct and digital revenues. What we did is using the combination of Saga's markets on traffic system and Saga's CRM called Grumple. We analyzed local direct advertisers who purchased a blended product consisting, as I mentioned earlier, of search, display, OTT or social. We compared January of '23 through October of '23 to January '24 through October '24. Here's what we found. Local direct advertisers who bought a blended product, their radio spend increased by 9% year-over-year. While their overall radio and digital spend increased by 27% year-over-year. Conversely, over the same period, local direct advertisers who did not buy a blended product, their radio spend dropped by 13% year-over-year. Furthermore, accounts who were never presented blended advertising at all, experienced a 50% to 55% decrease in the radio spend. And when blended advertising was pitched, but the client didn't buy the radio spend still increased by 1% to 2%. Since the last time we talked in November 7, overall as a company, we have written $5.7 million in local direct blended orders involving 203 different customers. Of that, $209 million were digital dollars and $2.8 million were radio dollars -- $2.9 million were digital dollars and $2.8 million were radio dollars. During the same period, blended advertising orders yielded us -- listen to this, during the same period, blended advertising orders yielded us 4.3 times more than non-blended orders. And when examining the radio only dollars and comparing blended and non-blended orders, we found that those who bought blended spent 96% more on radio than those who did not buy blended. Building on these results, and again, please listen…

That's an important point to make. Thank you, Chris. Chris, we did get a few questions in. A lot of them we've already answered, so I won't go through those. We did get one that says, can you give us take a census of the current advertising market in the first quarter since the quarter is nearly over and a sense of the trends by month in the quarter? What is spot advertising done/spacing what are you hearing from your local advertisers? I'll start. We obviously did -- I did in my comments talk about the first quarter in general, break it down a little bit more. January and February were about the same. With both being down high single digits. March was a bit better being down mid-single digits. I'll go beyond the first quarter a little bit and say that April and May and June have all improved and we expect to continue to see improvement in the second quarter with April starting down mid-single digits and by June, appearing to be flat to up a little in pacing. And again, June still a ways out. So as we know in radio and digital advertising, everything comes on a much quicker basis these days. Maybe, Chris, you can talk about here, what you're hearing from local advertisers and spot advertising?

Well, I don't think it's any secret that the industry is facing a stronger than a downdraft. The -- my fellow CEOs that I speak to are not happy with it. And again, I just come back to one thing. Many of them don't have a plan. Some of them don't, some of them do, some have some very good plans. We have an excellent plan. And I for one, and I think I speak for our team that we're very optimistic, particularly as we get into the second half of this year and beyond.

Thank you, Chris. Another question, many radio stations have turned to central casting to reduce head count and talent cost and/or looking to regional hub and spoke strategies. Is this something that's obvious contemplating?

I'll take that one Sam. Massive cuts, no. We're not going to central casting. Our most important assets are people, walk in and out of the doors of our radio stations every day. That being said, we are always and continue advantage of operating efficiencies across all platforms in all of our Saga markets. That's something we do on an ongoing basis, be more efficient. But our people are most important and our sustaining resource, and that is not a plan that we have now or in the future.

And to add to that, that gives us the extreme localism that we do have that a lot of our brethren don't have, which allows us to continue to connect as a trusted source for advertising, both local and digital, in all our markets. There was another question that had to do with changes in terms of your digital strategy. I don't think we need to add any more there. You spent quite a bit of time talking about that. But as we all know, and as you said, radio improves as digital improves and we're on a good transformational strategic plan to move forward. And with that, I will turn it back over to John for wrapping up.

John, are you there?

Yes. Thank you. This does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect at this time.